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Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Don't blame Dems for Trump
Trump won with a meager 31.7% of eligible voters. Unlike Barack Obama and Joe Biden, he failed to get a majority of those who did vote.
Holding the Senate was an impossible task because Democrats held contested seats in three deep-red states (West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana). But Democrats won four out of five swing-state Senate races (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin) and fought Republicans to a draw in the House.
In short, the 2024 election was not a mandate.
But that didn’t stop media charlatans from denouncing the Democrats.
Ruy Teixeira, a once-progressive opinion writer who has spent decades in elite Beltway think tanks, said, “The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap — and sometimes not at all — with those of ordinary Americans.”
TV host Bill Maher, who’d said he was certain Harris would win, said Harris lost because of an article in Scientific American that purportedly trafficked in “wokeness.”
The implication is that the Democratic Party is out of touch with everyday people.
This is a nifty little self-defense mechanism for Democrats who aren’t willing to see the MAGA social pathology for what it is.
Shifting blame to “the politicians” or “the consultants” in the Democratic Party gives a get-out-of-jail-free card to relatives and neighbors and co-workers who are handmaidens to fascism (however unwittingly).
Alienation from people one interacts with, or is intertwined with, is avoided through denial. No messiness. No compartmentalization. Plaster on a fake smile and call it a day.
The purveyors of blame-Democrats-first narratives, most of whom have never so much as run for student council, suffer the conceit that they have more insight into winning strategies than Harris’s senior campaign advisor, David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 landslide win.
The assertion that Trump won because of Democratic failures rests on the notion that voters are rational actors.
The major impact of uncontrollable events (economic cycles, COVID, foreign interference, foreign crises, the frames the media chooses to hype) is minimized in favor of the theory that if Candidate A just uses the right messaging, they can appeal to voters’ innate goodness and high-minded desire to do the right thing by their fellow citizens. Easy peasy.
In addition to being a naïve view of human nature, this belief has little relevance to the 2024 election because Harris ran a pretty effective campaign.
Her rollout was smooth and surprised the Trump campaign.
She consolidated party support quickly.
The Democrats had an energetic and unified convention that aggressively targeted working voters.
Harris vivisected Trump in the debate he didn’t chicken out of.
She raised tons of money for ads and organizing, had a much bigger (in-house) field operation, blanketed swing states, and had her political surrogates do the same.
Harris downplayed her race and gender and picked a gun-toting, white male everyman veteran as her VP so as not to threaten moderate white voters.
She mitigated Trump’s false messaging on immigration by actively endorsing a bipartisan plan co-authored by Republican senator James Lankford.
She mitigated Trump’s false messaging on crime by casting the election as a choice between a felon and a prosecutor.
While Trump closed the campaign by fellating a microphone, ending a town hall meeting to dance for 39 minutes, and hosting a pre-election Madison Square Garden event rife with racial slurs and echoes of an infamous 1939 pro-Nazi rally, Harris went through the whole campaign without a substantial gaffe.
The most obvious explanation for Harris’ loss, the one the media ignores for fear of sacrificing eyeballs (and more importantly, dollars), is that tens of millions of American voters are bigoted and/or politically illiterate.
Divorced from objective reality
We no longer live in a Lincoln-Douglas debate nation, where civic-minded audiences patiently listen to nuanced three-hour arguments about substantive issues.
We live in a country with a long history of anti-intellectualism where the average IQ is 98 and 54% of our citizens ages 16 to 74 read below a sixth-grade level.
We live in a country of short attention spans, shrinking sound bites, stuporous consumerism, and cellphone-clutching zombies.
We live in a country where students at elite universities whine about reading requirements.
We live in a country with mass disinformation funnels that systematically weaponize ignorance by spoon-feeding lies and distortions 24-7 through Newsmax, Fox, One America News, Sinclair Broadcasting, right-wing radio, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, social media, the Manosphere, and a zillion other platforms.
We live in a country where a critical mass of our citizens is divorced from objective reality.
37% of Americans believe the earth was created in the last 10,000 years and one in five still believe in Biblical literalism.
One in four religious voters believe that a man found liable for sexual abuse, who cheated on his first wife with his second wife, his second wife with his third wife, and his third wife with a porn star, unprotected, was “chosen by God.” Never mind his 34 felony convictions and multi-million-dollar civil penalties for business fraud.
America has the highest per capita fossil fuel consumption in the world, but the very existence of climate change — which threatens human civilization — is denied by 28% of our citizens. 42% of Americans don’t even grasp the direct role human activity plays in rising CO2 levels, which has been public knowledge for four decades.
Our president is so hostile to the scientific method that 75% of scientists in a recent Nature magazine poll said they were open to leaving the U.S.
In such a country, where half of adults can’t name all three branches of government, the average voter has little understanding of how a bill becomes law or how their representative votes day in and day out. They don’t know what’s happening in D.C. beyond headlines, let alone how it’s happening, why it’s happening, obstacles legislation will face in the courts, or the full human impacts of a law once it is implemented.
In this environment of widespread political illiteracy, many voters shrink complicated issues down to oversimplistic, shorthand impressions — vibes or feelings — instead of using rational, evidence-based analysis.
This was clear in the way voters viewed the economy, the decisive issue in the 2024 election.
As happened across much of the world during the tumult of COVID, many voters wrongly assumed that correlation is causation, that incumbent governments were automatically to blame for the state of the economy.
While Biden was president, inflation rose 21.2%, the steepest increase since the oil shocks of the ’70s and early ’80s. Yet inflation barely outpaced wage growth, which was 19.4% during the same period.
Republicans claimed Biden’s stimulus spending was a major driver of inflation, but this was speculation, not hard fact. Mainstream economists feel that Biden’s deficit spending — which was roughly half of Trump’s — may have moved things around the margins, but not to a large degree.
U.S. President Joe Biden, flanked by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
And even if Biden deserved some blame for inflation, it’s clear that he inherited a no-win situation. If he had failed to pump enough stimulus into the economy, he could have been blamed for a slow recovery, as Obama was. Republicans handed Biden a shit sandwich and then complained about the flavor.
What’s objectively undeniable is that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon caused by COVID-driven supply-chain disruptions (and potentially some degree of corporate greed).
And U.S. inflation rates were within the norms of our G20 allies.
And America had a quicker rebound and higher job growth than developed world peers, the lowest unemployment in over 50 years, and wage growth has been higher than inflation since February 2023.
And these conditions especially benefited Ruy Teixeira’s common man and woman, who had the biggest jumps in pay they’d experienced since the ’90s dot-com boom.
The rebound was so vigorous that just prior to the election, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal said that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world,” a huge turnaround from four years prior, when America experienced record job losses on Trump’s watch.
26 million interviews
Despite the above facts, and Democratic presidents significantly outperforming Republicans economically over several decades, a majority of Americans felt Trump would do a better job of managing the economy than Harris.
By this convoluted logic, Trump deserved credit for the record sustained growth he inherited from Obama and no blame for losing 22 million jobs, while Biden (and Harris, by extension) received no credit for presiding over an economy that was “the envy of the world” and shouldered the blame for pandemic-related inflation that was experienced worldwide.
The disconnect, as with so many in American politics, is rooted in ignorance.
Democratic data guru David Shor’s firm, Blue Rose, conducted 26 million interviews in 2024. Shor found that less-engaged voters were most likely to blame Harris for inflation and gas prices. Shor also discovered that low-information voters on Tik Tok swung 8% more Republican than in 2020 and “politically-disengaged” voters swung 14 points to Republicans. (They continue to support Trump in the highest numbers.)
In a podcast interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, Shor pointed out that many self-described moderates without college degrees suffered from cognitive dissonance (holding contradictory views without realizing it).
Broad misunderstandings of the economy are of a piece with a feeling among many working-class stiffs — white ones especially — that Republicans better represent their interests.
Recent history definitively proves otherwise.
Other than one-term George Bush, Sr., every Republican president of the last 45 years has followed a trickle-down template: slash social services for our most vulnerable citizens, including disabled children; lavish lucrative subsidies on highly-profitable defense contractors; give the most privileged Americans huge tax cuts; and toss in a helping of union-busting.
The GOP has done very little to address steep increases in the costs of health care, education, childcare, or housing during this time, even when they’ve controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.
By contrast, Democratic presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden focused heavily on cost-of-living issues. All three were endlessly filibustered by Senate Republicans, forcing Democrats to abandon economic reform or water it down enough to secure every Democratic Senate vote necessary for passage.
Unable to get broad-based change due to factors beyond their control, Democrats were painted as ineffective, which fed public misperceptions about the major parties’ stark differences in priorities.
In other words, Teixeira’s claim that “the Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman” gets it backward.
The Democrats are in fact the only party representing the economic interests of the common man and woman.
The Biden presidency offers the most recent example of this long-term trend.
Biden stood up for everyday people by staffing federal agencies with consumer advocates, supporting net neutrality, taking on Big Tech and other monopolies, going after junk fees, reducing student loan debt, extending the COVID-era eviction moratorium, increasing the minimum wage for federal workers, and being arguably the most pro-union president in decades.
The first big bill Biden signed, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, helped struggling state and local governments push through the then-raging COVID pandemic, put $1,400 in the pocket of 85% of Americans, greatly expanded access to healthcare coverage (including mental health and substance abuse treatment), lowered healthcare and prescription drug costs, and cut child poverty by 30 percent.
The American Rescue Plan Act passed without a single Republican vote.
The second consequential measure Biden signed, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, pumps over a trillion dollars into roads, bridges, highways, the electric grid, public transit, and broadband access for rural areas that didn’t back Biden. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that the bill would support 772,000 jobs per year for its first decade, in both red and blue states.
The third big bill Biden signed, the CHIPS and Science Act, shores up our industrial base by investing $280 billion in domestic manufacturing of semiconductors, STEM workforce development, and research and development. The bill helps both rural and urban constituencies and provides a boost to non-degreed Americans with the requisite skills.
The fourth major bill Biden signed, the Inflation Reduction Act, lowered prescription drug prices, funded Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years to keep rates down, and provided a record investment in clean energy production — and with it, manufacturing jobs.
The Inflation Reduction Act received unanimous support from Democrats but not a single Republican vote, despite the fact that Republican districts received most of the benefits. (Eighteen House Republicans begged Speaker Mike Johnson not to repeal it.)
The Inflation Reduction Act was part of Biden’s much bigger Build Back Better Plan, which would have capped childcare costs, expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for working Americans, created over a million public housing units, removed barriers to union organizing, expanded Medicaid eligibility, increased homecare for the elderly and guaranteed homecare workers a decent wage, and funded universal preschool, two free years of community college, and paid family and medical leave.
Biden’s achievements were of such a grand scale that he was ranked among the top 15 presidents in a poll of presidential scholars, 31 slots ahead of Trump (who was dead last). Because of this sensei-level governance, the longshot odds of beating Biden in a primary, and Biden’s general election polling relative to potential primary opponents, no viable Democrats stepped up to challenge him in 2024.
Meanwhile, helped along by a media obsessed with the president’s age, Ruy Teixeira’s common man and woman rewarded Biden for his tireless efforts on their behalf by running him out on a rail in favor of a right-wing billionaire guaranteed to make their lives tangibly worse.
'Values voters'
Republicans have been getting the votes of working stiffs while screwing them economically ever since the Civil Rights Act passed. The “modern” GOP continues to manipulate the amygdalae of blue-collar voters with hot-button issues that have exactly zero impact on their daily lives.
This was echoed in Shor’s finding that a sizable number of working-class voters in the States are “values voters,” not unlike working-class voters in other developed countries.
In plain English this means that when faced with rapid social and technological change, many human beings who haven’t been forced to open their minds through the college experience lurch toward prejudice.
Study after study after study after study after study showed that Trump owed his 2016 “victory” in large part to dehumanizing racist and sexist appeals. He used the same tactics in 2024.
Though he lost to a white man who barely campaigned in 2020, Trump beat two women who were vastly more qualified for the job — the second after he ended the right to choose and made women second-class citizens in most of red America.
Protesters outside the U.S. Supreme Court. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Much has been made of the Democrats’ supposed “wokeness.” Apparently some Americans — especially men — feel that they shouldn’t have to be thoughtful toward populations who’ve historically been discriminated against and continue to be discriminated against. This ties in with so-called “cancel culture,” where people who publicly state unpopular opinions are marginalized.
In the same vein, red state Republicans get their hackles up about Critical Race Theory (CRT), which acknowledges the role centuries of institutional racism play in current socioeconomic outcomes.
To the extent that “wokeness” and “cancel culture” exist, don’t hold your breath trying to find even one (1) example of a “woke” piece of legislation signed into law by Joe Biden that negatively impacts Americans without a degree, or a single instance of Democrats pushing CRT at the national level.
Another phantasm the Trump campaign got a lot of mileage out of with “values voters” was the specter of trans Americans.
Apparently, having to occasionally try to make other people comfortable in their own skin by addressing them with preferred pronouns is a major imposition on one’s “freedom,” or self-expression, or something.
And nothing is so threatening to the common man and woman as trans athletes. Of the 500,000 athletes in college sports, fewer than 10 identify as trans. Unless you are one of the teeny, tiny percentage of people competing against a trans athlete, or the parent of one of these people, you have zero skin in the game.
None.
Republican plays to bigotry also explain their fixation on illegal immigration.
Amplifying fears of brown hordes coming across the border into land we stole from Mexico in 1848 is the gift that keeps on giving for the GOP.
Yes, illegal immigration is a problem throughout parts of the Southwest U.S.
But it’s a complex problem and many Republican talking points are dubious if not patently false.
Evidence that immigrants “steal American jobs” is thin.
Immigrants don’t drain taxpayer benefits. Immigrants contribute more to the economy than they take in and tend not to apply for benefits due to a lack of awareness about available programs and a desire to stay out of the way.
Illegal immigrant voter fraud is “vanishingly rare.” Any reasonably intelligent person could deduce that people who are in the country illegally aren’t going to risk deportation to vote.
Just as the Trump campaign falsely claimed Democrats had wanted to “defund the police” and lied about the extent of crime at the national level (though the federal government has no purview over local law enforcement), he ramped up fury over a “migrant crime wave” that had little basis in reality.
The race-baiting, lies, and distortions were compounded by the fact that far-right Republicans are the reason border problems continue.
If Ruy Teixeira’s common man and woman paid attention to legislative battles, they would know that bipartisan immigration reform bills were sabotaged three times by nativist Republicans.
In 2007, right-wing Republicans killed a bipartisan bill which was supported by most Democrats and many conservative Republicans, including President George W. Bush.
In 2014, after Obama’s bipartisan immigration bill passed the Senate, it was deep-sixed by House Republicans.
Last year, when Biden and many Democrats swallowed their misgivings to support a punitive immigration reform bill co-authored by James Lankford, the far-right Republican senator from Oklahoma, Trump convinced congressional Republicans to kill the bill on false pretenses so immigration would be a potent issue in the presidential campaign.
As with their decades of obstruction on economic reform, the GOP reliably follows a simple formula with immigration reform: block, blame shift, weaponize. Keep positive change from happening, lie about why the problem continues, and capitalize on the public’s frustration (and ignorance) when it continues to fester.
Rinse and repeat.
'A big, burly, anarchic beast'
The endless thinking errors and logical fallacies exploited by the GOP’s massive disinformation ecosystem combine with a long list of built-in advantages Republicans bring to every election cycle: gerrymandering, the rural tilt of the Senate, intentionally-racist GOP voter suppression laws, an electorate that is 71% white and 25% evangelical white, bothsidesism among legacy media that normalizes the MAGA social pathology, the right- and white-wing bias of the electoral college, and lingering animosity toward the federal government in one (heavily-subsidized) region of the country that lost a war defending slavery.
Between all of this and homophobia, racism, misogyny, transphobia, and an American culture of individualism which often manifests in cruelty, it’s a wonder Democrats came as close as they did in 2024.
Frankly, it’s a wonder Democrats ever win.
For all the finger-pointing directed at Democrats for being “terrible at messaging” or out of touch with “real Americans,” the reality is that the number of truly persuadable voters is small and shrinking.
And for forward-thinking messaging to work: 1) major media would have to pivot to policy-based coverage; 2) low-information persuadables would have to have a desire to learn; 3) low-information persuadables would have to act on their desire to learn while knowing how to access valid information, having the capacity to understand what they’re taking in, having the capacity to contextualize the information, and actually getting off their butts to vote.
Good luck with that.
U.S. federal politics is a big, burly, anarchic beast. Stars like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama can’t be manufactured. They’re unusually charismatic figures (and men, which helps) who ran at very opportune moments: during recessions when the opposing party had the White House and candidates who didn’t inspire the base.
Savvy messaging, slick re-branding, and smart campaign tactics can move things around the margins, but so long as America has such a high concentration of bigoted, distracted, misinformed, and uninformed voters, expect one close election (and many gravely disappointing ones) after another.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Dan Benbow has been an online political features writer since 2003. His work has appeared at RawStory, the Miami Herald, the New York Daily News, Salon, Truthout, and the Progressive. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel and can be reached at benbowauthor@gmail.com and followed @danbenbow on BlueSky.